The present invention relates generally to the field of addressing systems for use in producing mail pieces, and more particularly to a method for producing the Optional Endorsement Line of the address field in a manner that consistently meets the requirements of the U.S. Postal Service.
The challenges of mail delivery within the United States and in the growing ranks of industrialized countries has grown so that, in the United States alone, the postal service delivers approximately 600 million pieces of mail per day. To the growing postal burden is added the requirements of keeping address data accurate and readable by both mail handling machines and the mail carriers that physically deliver the mail. With the need to reduce costs while improving the efficiency and reliability of postal operations, continuous review of methodology and the systems used to implement operations is required. Thus, the growing burden of delivering mail efficiently results in the development of regulations by the United States Postal Service (USPS) that are designed to take the best possible advantage of the technology available for mail handling.
Among the requirements for mail handling, is the printing of an Optional Endorsement Line (OEL) containing certain required data for specific classes of mailings. The requirements also include formatting requirements that must be adhered to when the OEL is printed on a mail piece as part of the destination address block. Further, two specific requirements within the OEL parameters are that the OEL be printed as the top line in a destination address, and that the OEL be right justified relative to the destination block data. Therefore, when properly printed, none of the lines that appear beneath the OEL in a destination address are allowed to have characters that are printed further to the right than the right most character in the OEL.
Though there are a number of applications commercially available for printing destination block data, those applications are generally limited by either the inability to meet the justifications requirements, or those applications place restrictions on the printable region or modify the destination address to ensure justification of the OEL. A further limitation of the prior art, lies in the inability of systems capable of right justification to be able to maintain the integrity of the destination block data while printing each address of the address list. The prior art can set a right justification parameter for a group of addresses, but must manually adjust the parameters as each individual address is printed from the list, or simply maintain the parameter initially selected. A clear limitation then is in the efficiency of the prior art system; or, in the inability of the system to accommodate justification changes for an entire address list rather than simply a single selected parameter.
Some existing applications ensure the right justification of the OEL data statically by restricting the printable area within the destination address block and then extending the OEL so that its right most character is printed at the right most position within the destination address block. This method does not ensure that all addresses will be able to be printed in their entirety because of the restricted print area. In the following example from the prior art, for instance, the printable region is delineated by a dashed line: ##STR1## The OEL (the top line) in the above example is extended to print all the way to the right of the printable region. The suite number in the address field was intended to read "STE 101," but because the data exceeded the restricted print region as determined by the OEL, the "101" became truncated. To avoid truncation within the street address line, the application would be required to horizontally compress the printed line to ensure that all the data would be printed.
Other existing applications use a fixed length OEL whose length is pre-determined to ensure that the OEL's right most character will be further to the right than the data which may be printed below it. Unfortunately, this example of the prior art does not guarantee that data for every address line will in fact be shorter than the OEL unless the address list and associated data are scanned or read completely before setting the length of the OEL.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide for a method of right justification of a single line in a destination address (specifically the OEL), "on the fly," so as to meet the requirements of the USPS without abridging destination address data.